Property Tax Funding was created in 2008 to help Texas property owners pay their property taxes easily. Since then, the organization has helped more than 10,000 people pay their taxes and save money on their tax bills. In order to continue scaling and growing revenue, they needed to develop a sophisticated marketing system.
We were hired to better leverage Property Tax Funding’s HubSpot through automation of workflows, lists, forms, and reporting. Unlocking HubSpot’s full capabilities delivered more marketing-qualified leads to the sales team and eliminated nurturing tasks from their plate, so the volume of leads they could handle increased. The improved lead attribution and ROI visibility also allowed Property Tax Funding leadership to properly plan and budget for future marketing initiatives.
The Challenge
Understanding ROI and Lead Attribution:
The decision to invest more ad spend in digital and direct mail was unclear due to a lack of ROI data from Property Tax Funding’s tech stack.
Automating Lead Qualification, Assignment, and Nurturing:
They needed help incorporating automation into their lead process, which included optimizing the website to capture leads and qualify them, routing leads to their salespeople based on percentages (70% to Salesperson A and 30% to Salesperson B), and nurturing leads with SMS follow-ups.
Utilizing HubSpot’s Capabilities:
Property Tax Funding invested in HubSpot but wasn’t taking advantage of its offerings regarding executive dashboards, workflows, lists, data management, or automation to develop a genuinely sophisticated marketing system that’s scalable and grows revenue.
The Solution
Website Form Strategy for Inbounding and Qualifying New Leads
Not everyone who visits a website is ready to make a purchase. Visitors fall on different stages of the buyer’s journey anywhere from awareness, consideration, to decision. People who are just starting their search for solutions are “top of funnel,” meaning they’re gathering information. People who are “bottom of funnel” have already done their research, have decided on what solution solves their problem, and are deciding which specific brand, company, or product to purchase.
To separate leads who are more prepared to make a purchase decision, we identified which forms across the Property Tax Funding website were top of funnel forms versus the bottom of funnel forms that are better suited for qualifying leads. From there, we determined what criteria were essential to include that would filter a lead as qualified. Then, we made that information consistent across all of the bottom of funnel forms to complete the overall website form strategy.
Ringcentral Integration for CRM Phone Call Lead Capture
Since offline marketing campaigns commonly generated leads via phone calls (which their CRM didn’t initially track), we set up a native Ringcentral integration into HubSpot to capture those leads. The issue we faced was that leads could not be matched with existing HubSpot records if they input their phone number in a different format than E.164, which has a plus sign, the country code, and then the phone number with an area code.
For example, the US has a country code of 1, so someone who inputs their number as (666) 888-7890 would show +16668887890 in E.164. Brazil has a country code of 55, so the number would be +556668887890 in E.164.
Ringcentral only formats phone numbers in E.164. We solved this disparity in phone number format by connecting Insycle, which automatically transformed phone numbers to E.164 in HubSpot so we could compare them with the incoming Ringcentral numbers.
Qualifying and Nurturing Leads with Automation
With the optimized forms in place and phone calls getting logged, we set up several HubSpot workflows to determine if those leads were qualified or not. The workflow identified what information was missing and sent a follow-up request email for that data. Several documents are required when qualifying a lead. The workflows took the manual follow-up away from the salespeople and automatically generated reminders for the salespeople when action was needed.
Automated Lead Assignment
Now that we qualified the leads, we needed to route them to the loan officers using percentages (ex: Salesperson A gets 30% and Salesperson B gets 70% of the leads). In order to get HubSpot to distribute leads based on a percentage, we had to do a little trick using Zapier. Every new contact creation in HubSpot triggers an action in Zapier that randomly assigns a number between 1 and 100. We then use that number in a workflow to determine who gets the leads. For example, Salesperson A would get all contacts with a value between 1-30, and Salesperson B would receive all contacts between 31-100, creating a 30%/70% split.
SMS Lead Follow-Up Automation
Many Property Tax Funding leads prefer communicating via two-way SMS. To take the burden off of salespeople, we set up a workflow kicking off the SMS correspondence by sending a webhook to Zapier and utilizing Ringcentral to send the SMS. If the lead responds, the salesperson is notified and takes over the conversation, so they’re only dedicating time to highly active leads.
The Results
HubSpot has automatically sent thousands of emails and SMS messages in Property Tax Funding’s marketing lead process. The automation saves salespeople time, and each one can handle more leads as a result. Moreover, the automatic assignment of leads based on percentage allows new salespeople to ramp up within the company and slowly get more leads as they become ready.
It’s now easy for Property Tax Funding to see leads go through the funnel by lifecycle stage, which leads to accurate forecasting based on visible conversion rates. They can also attribute leads in different stages of the buyer’s journey to the appropriate advertising channels.
HubSpot’s automation further benefited Property Tax Funding with their lead management and nurturing. Contacts are now automatically re-engaged during Property Tax Funding’s crucial times of the year to drive revenue. HubSpot also sends automated Google review requests to clients (who already gave positive feedback) for the specific office near them to help build social proof and credibility.
If manual tasks are bogging down your salespeople and your CMS hinders rather than helps business growth, contact us to learn how HubSpot automates processes to create more time for selling (instead of administration).
